FREN 310 - Passerelles: Introduction to French and Francophone Studies

This course is a topics course designed to introduce students to the diversity of French and Francophone Cultures. Through the means of diverse medias: images, music, films, and texts, students will engage with different approaches to the cultural productions of several areas. The course includes aspects of French culture as well to cover how France and the Francophone World engage with each other. Units will include: The transformations of Paris (May 1968, immigration, Paris and its periphery); The Tunisian Revolutions (from one Tunisia to the next); West Africa (modern cultures; emigration; riches); Central Africa (identity; languages; survival); Algeria (web documentaries on several generations, gender, rural/urban); Morocco (youth, tales of women, performances of human rights); Island multiculturalism (Mauritius cosmopolitanism, Caribbean diversity, Haitian riches, French Polynesian artists, Madagascar youth and history); Quebec (identity; language; diversity). The course will be conducted as a seminar. The goals of the course are to introduce students to a rich cultural transnational world in multiple relations with France, French language, changed by this relation and changing France and French as well, through various media. Films will be screened out of class. Taught in French. Prerequisite(s): FREN 204 Offered occasionally. (4 Credits)